Bracketology 101: Anticipating the Upsets in the East Bracket

17 Mar 2014

The upsets make the NCAA tournament, and the winners of bracket office pools are generally made up of fans who can predict those upsets, which aren’t always unpredictable. Beating the bracket takes the guts to pick the occasional underdog, but more importantly, takes the knowledge to pick the undervalued, overlooked underdog. The East Region’s four games that appear in the bottom half of the bracket show several potential upsets, according to my interpretation of the Value Add Rankings.

Providence’s Bryce Cotton has improved the Friars from 58th to 40th (www.kenpom.com) in the final month while taking the Big East title. They should upset the more talented UNC team that relies on two future NBA power forwards. While everyone is excited about Iowa State’s performance, NC Central has a real chance to pull off an unlikely 13-seed vs. 4-seed shocker. They are one of the hottest teams (improved from 117th to 78th in last month) and have three of the top 250 Value Add players (as Iowa State does), and two of those NC Central players are senior guards. For all the love for Shabazz Napier as the 2nd best player in the country based on Value Add, Saint Joseph’s can counter with likely future NBA guard Langston Galloway (22nd best player) and they are a hotter team after improving from 81st to 49th in just a month.

Home Advantage: Iowa State is already the better seed and could be helped further by playing the Providence-UNC winner in San Antonio.

The following are the Value Add Rankings for each player in the bottom half of the East Region bracket, their team’s seed, height, year in school, and which players are NBA prospects (all caps). The teams are UConn (7-seed), Iowa St. (3), Milwaukee (15), NC Central (14), UNC (6), Providence (11), St. Joseph’s (10) and Villanova (2).

The items listed for the top few players on each team should be the biggest considerations along with injured players, the home advantage, and which team enters the tournament hot (which we define as improving the most at www.kenpom.com over the past month of the season). The system is a precise measurement of how many points a player adds to his team’s score per game over the player who takes his place. Every score (three-pointer, two-pointer or foul shot), assist, offensive rebound, foul drawn, etc. helps a team score while every turnover and missed shot costs the team points. On defense, every steal, blocked shot, defensive rebound, turnover forced, and opponent’s missed shot takes points off the board while every basket or offensive rebound allowed adds to the opponent’s score. The player’s offensive and defensive combination calculates together with the help of the stats at www.kenpom.com. How many points a player adds to his team’s score appears in the offensive category (shown as “off” in the table below), and his overall impact on points once defense is factored appears as “Total” on the table.

Here are the Bottom East Bracket Players (teams in order they appear on bracket):